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I set up an external hard drive on a previous laptop which I no longer have. It seems that I have set it so that that user is the only with read and write permissions. So from my mac it thinks I'm a user with read only permissions. I really want to be able to use the external hard drive properly, is there a way I can change the permissions from my Mac to get proper access to it and write files to it?
MacBook Air 13″, macOS 11.5
On your present computer use Disk Utilities >> View >> View ALL Attached devices. On left look for the Upper Most name of the External Drive ( example Western Digital ). Choose the Name of the External Drive and on right - choose to Erase the drive and format it as APFS / GUID Partition Map. This will Erase Everything on the drive and there is not recovery.
If the drive is to be used on both Apple and Windows computer - suggest formatting as exFat with Master Boot Record Partition Map. Apple can read and write to this file format as can Windows. Fat32 format is too fragile as a filing system and can not handle file sized larger than 4 GB wherein exFat does as better job on larger files.
On your present computer use Disk Utilities >> View >> View ALL Attached devices. On left look for the Upper Most name of the External Drive ( example Western Digital ). Choose the Name of the External Drive and on right - choose to Erase the drive and format it as APFS / GUID Partition Map. This will Erase Everything on the drive and there is not recovery.
If the drive is to be used on both Apple and Windows computer - suggest formatting as exFat with Master Boot Record Partition Map. Apple can read and write to this file format as can Windows. Fat32 format is too fragile as a filing system and can not handle file sized larger than 4 GB wherein exFat does as better job on larger files.
It depends. Select the Disk in Finder and Get Info (cmd-I).
If the Format is NTFS, macOS can only read that format. You probably installed software that allows writing. I would move everything off of it, format as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), then move everything back.
If it already is Mac OS Extended, click the padlock at the bottom of the Info pane to authenticate, then check the box to ignore ownership.
Thanks for the advice. I figured it might involve reformatting and now I know about some different file types which is probably causing the Mac windows read write issues.
Thanks. I’ll definitely reformat and then work with these files types. Cheers.
Permissions on an external hard drive
